Sam Biddle

It's normal to see a dismembered, screaming, blood-soaked individual and be, to say the least, completely shocked. But if you're a military medic, that costs lives. The solution? A training program that forces action in the face of (artificial) carnage.

To this end, the US military hires Strategic Operations, a Hollywood-grade production firm that creates training simulations that are right up there with the real thing (except, you know, anticipation of actual death). But the visuals the trainees are greeted with (and forced to respond to) are just as gruesome as anything you'd see on the battlefield.

Advertisement

To prep field medics with the jarring sights they need to expect during deployment, hundreds of actors are equipped with mangled prosthetics and blood pumps (along with some very convincing screams of agony) to create realistic scenes of war medicine. "It becomes so intense and real," says Strategic Operations exec Kit Lavell. "I've seen medics freeze up—some not knowing what's going on." [Fast Company]